Mel Blanc

Melvin Jerome Blanc (born Blank ; May 30, 1908 – July 10, 1989) was an American voice actor and radio personality whose career spanned over 60 years.

During the Golden Age of Radio, he provided character voices and vocal sound effects for comedy radio programs, including those of Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, The Great Gildersleeve, Judy Canova, and his own short-lived sitcom.

However, he became known worldwide for his work in the Golden Age of American Animation as the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, and numerous other characters from the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical cartoons.

Blanc also voiced the Looney Tunes characters Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd after replacing their original performers Joe Dougherty and Arthur Q. Bryan, respectively (though he did occasionally voice Elmer during Bryan's lifetime as well).

He later voiced characters for Hanna-Barbera's television cartoons, including Barney Rubble and Dino on The Flintstones, Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons, Secret Squirrel on The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show, the title character of Speed Buggy, and Captain Caveman on Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels and The Flintstone Kids.

Referred to as "The Man of a Thousand Voices", he is regarded as one of the most influential people in the voice acting industry, and as one of the greatest voice actors of all time.

Blanc was born on May 30, 1908, in San Francisco, California, to Eva (née Katz), a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, and Frederick Blank (born in New York to German Jewish parents), the younger of two children.

He grew up in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, and later in Portland, Oregon, where he attended Lincoln High School.

He had an early fondness for voices and dialect, which he began practicing at the age of 10.

He claimed that he changed the spelling of his name when he was 16, from Blank to Blanc, because a teacher told him that he would amount to nothing and be like his name, a "blank".

He joined the Order of DeMolay as a young man, and was eventually inducted into its Hall of Fame.

After graduating from high school in 1927, he divided his time between leading an orchestra, becoming the youngest conductor in the country at the age of 19; and performing shtick in vaudeville shows around Washington, Oregon and northern California.

Blanc began his radio career at the age of 19 in 1927, when he made his acting debut on the KGW program The Hoot Owls, where his ability to provide voices for multiple characters first attracted attention.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1932, where he met Estelle Rosenbaum (1909–2003), whom he married a year later, before returning to Portland.

He moved to KEX in 1933 to produce and co-host his Cobweb and Nuts show with his wife Estelle, which debuted on June 15.

The program played Monday through Saturday from 11:00 pm to midnight, and by the time the show ended two years later, it appeared from 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm.With his wife's encouragement, Blanc returned to Los Angeles and joined Warner Bros.–owned KFWB in Hollywood in 1935.

He joined The Johnny Murray Show, but the following year switched to CBS Radio and The Joe Penner Show.

Blanc was a regular on the NBC Red Network show The Jack Benny Program in various roles, including voicing Benny's Maxwell automobile (in desperate need of a tune-up), violin teacher Professor LeBlanc, Polly the Parrot, Benny's pet polar bear Carmichael and the train announcer.

The first role came from a mishap when the recording of the automobile's sounds failed to play on cue, prompting Blanc to take the microphone and improvise the sounds himself.

The audience reacted so positively that Benny decided to dispense with the recording altogether and have Blanc continue in that role.

One of Blanc's characters from Benny's radio (and later TV) programs was "Sy, the Little Mexican", who spoke one word at a time.

In December 1936, Mel Blanc joined Leon Schlesinger Productions, which was producing theatrical cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. After sound man Treg Brown was put in charge of cartoon voices, and Carl Stalling became music director, Brown introduced Blanc to animation directors Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin, who loved his voices.

The first cartoon Blanc worked on was Picador Porky (1937) as the voice of a drunken bull.

He soon after received his first starring role when he replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig's voice in Porky's Duck Hunt, which marked the debut of Daffy Duck, also voiced by Blanc.

Following this, Blanc became a very prominent vocal artist for Warner Bros., voicing a wide variety of the "Looney Tunes" characters.

Bugs Bunny, as whom Blanc made his debut in A Wild Hare (1940), was known for eating carrots frequently (especially while saying his catchphrase "Eh, what's up, doc?").

To follow this sound with the animated voice, Blanc would bite into a carrot and then quickly spit into a spittoon.

One often-repeated story is that Blanc was allergic to carrots, which Blanc denied.

In Disney's Pinocchio, Blanc was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat.

However, it was eventually decided to have Gideon be a mute character (similar to Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was deleted except for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the finished film.

Radio Daily magazine wrote in 1942 that Blanc "specialize[d] in over fifty-seven voices, dialects, and intricate sound effects", and by 1946, he was appearing on over fifteen programs in various supporting roles.

His success on The Jack Benny Program led to his own radio show on the CBS Radio Network, The Mel Blanc Show, which ran from September 3, 1946, to June 24, 1947.

Blanc played himself as the hapless owner of a fix-it shop, as well as his young cousin Zookie.

Blanc also appeared on such other national radio programs as The Abbott and Costello Show, the Happy Postman on Burns and Allen, and as August Moon on Point Sublime.

During World War II, he appeared as Private Sad Sack on various radio shows, including G.I. Journal.

Blanc recorded a song titled "Big Bear Lake".

Blanc also originated the voice and laugh of Woody Woodpecker for the theatrical cartoons produced by Walter Lantz for Universal Pictures, but stopped voicing Woody after the character's first three shorts when he was signed to an exclusive contract with Warner Bros. Despite this, his laugh was still used in the Woody Woodpecker cartoons until 1951, when Grace Stafford recorded a softer version, while his "Guess who!?"

He continued to work with Benny on radio until the series ended in 1955 and followed the program into television from Benny's 1950 debut episode through guest spots on NBC specials in the 1970s.

signature line was used in the opening titles until the end of the series and closure of Walter Lantz Productions in 1972.

During World War II, Blanc served as the voice of the hapless Private Snafu in a series of shorts produced by Warner Bros. as a way of training recruited soldiers through the medium of animation.